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Tangled Up In A Twist Of Fate 12 / An uninspected mind

Posted on November 21, 2012

Sunday night I watched austin City Limits on the local PBS channel’s side project. The bands were Mumford and Sons and Flogging Molly. M&S did their thing and were everything I expected. Then came Flogging Molly. I’d never heard them or heard of them. It was a joy. Irish punk played loud and fast with screaming vocals. They deserve points for best use of an accordian by a rock band, though it might be the norm in Ireland. Add a banjo and fiddle you’ve got what punk is supposed to be; music of the people. The folk roots showed here, most punk hides its roots but its ties to people are shown. They got me so tied into the music that I visited Amazon and bought their latest CD. Austin City Limits has turned me on to some great music; The Punch Brothers, The Civil Wars and Flooing Molly. I never payed much attention to ACL because I had the mistaken idea that there’d be a lot of whiny country and blue grass. Austin is a hip city in a state that fights hard to be in the nineteenth century. There are Texans who hang out in the twenty first century and are literary, musical and internet icons. I predjudiced. I was in San Antonio for basic training and there’s a huge pooibility that my animosity is misplaced. Basic and I didn’t get along. Something I used to be ashamed of but now view as a stand against being part of the machine. Yes, I spent four years and even thought of reenlisting, something I would have done if I could get the reenlistmwent NCO to stop laughing. That’s another story.

Donald “The Trumpster” Trump has had his burial plans aired on the web. He wants to be buried on one of his golf courses that have aproximately three acres set aside as a cemetary. His original plan was for a mausoleum with four obelisks surrounding it. The local officials said no to the original plan saying it was “too gaudy and out of step with the town’s rural character” Donny Trump gaudy? Say it ain’t so. How can a man who takes every opportunity to market himself or some product he likes be accused of being gaudy? I can see if he had his hair braided and wore dashikis. But no, all he does is pollute the media with a television show that espouses cut throat behavior and unbridled capitalism and flogging the birther dead horse. He won’t go away. Maybe we deserve him. After all we’ve always been self boosters to the point of irritating the rest of the world. Donny is a distillation of that essence. we have to live with it.

Two news anchors at the Bangor ME aBC affiliate resigned on-air. They had a problem with the powers that be asking them to skew the news politically. People in charge actually air biased news? Not in America. It took balls. If they handed in resignations they wouldn’t have the chance to say goodbye to their viewers. There is the chance, albeit a small one, that a talking head at a certain network (Fox) would just come out and say he couldn’t mouth the propaganda from the suits on top and was going to walk. Not likely. Money plays the news machine. All those commercials that give the anchor a chance to rinse his mouth after a round of headlines are there to make us believe that if major companies are willing to be tied to the news, we should too. There is a fallacy perpetrated by the Right that the networks have a liberal bias. The bias comes from the fact that people watch the news and would tune it out if it offended their sensibilities. Or they just need someone to yell “Asshole” at after dinner. I do that. I don’t believe that the networks are liberal, they’re pragmatic. They tell their audience what it wants to hear. Left, Right it doesn’t matter. You’ll never get a comp;ete picture from the TV news. To get a full view you’d have to read all the papers from both sides and then digest the data. You’d have an opinion and be nuts at the same time. All those news pundits we see? After their time on-air they retire to a padded room and scream for a theraputic fifteen minutes or so. Bill O’Reilly reads Marx to even his brain out. Maybe not. MSNBC requires that its news readers to listen to any Rwpublican speaker without cracking up laughing. Maybe that’s what we should do, laugh.

Art Ginsburg died. If you don’t know him maybe this’ll help: “Ooh! It’s so good.” He spent time on the air teaching viewers how to make food that would make their families happy. The foodie poobahs didn’t look on him as one of their own. Nope, he was for the people who never tasted a truffle or spent a whole day making stock. He was our grandmother’s chef. He used what he had and made it taste good.

A lot of bloggers are posting a lot on Thanksgiving. Get used to it. Me and everybody who has a post will put up something about the holidays.